[wplug-board] Tonight's planning call with HackPittsburgh

[Pat Barron]

The conference call with HackPittsburgh took place tonight.  Particpants 
were:

WPLUG:  Me
HackPittsburgh:  Doug Philips

The purpose of the call was to discuss a potential joint event - a 
"mini-installfest" - to be held in HackPittsburgh's space, in 
conjunction with one of their regularly scheduled public meetings.  This 
would be an "out-of-cycle" special event for us, outside of our usual 
meeting schedule, and might help us reach people who wouldn't normally 
attend our meetings or have much awareness of us or our activities.

HackPittsburgh's public events are normally held on Friday evenings at 
7:00pm.  In looking at their schedule (and being pretty sure that 
WPLUG's schedule for Friday evenings was pretty clear), we thought that 
Friday, March 16th would be a reasonable date to do this.  Doug is going 
to float that date to their membership to see if there's any objection, 
and of course I said that I'd run the date by you all to see if it was a 
problem.  I know this is a little soon on the heels of our installfest 
this past Saturday, but it reaches a different audience, so I think 
that's OK.

Our thought is that we can do this with minimal infrastructure - they 
have network access and power at their shop, and installs can be done 
from either CD/DVD or USB stick (i.e., no PXE server).  From their 
(HackPittsburgh membership) perspective, their members have primarily 
expressed interest in Ubuntu (which I have on CD, both 32-bit and 
64-bit).  So, I would bring my "Linux install media kit" that I had on 
Saturday - Ubuntu 11.10 (and 10.04 LTS), Fedora 16, Fedora 15 (for 
anyone that wants Fedora but doesn't have the 768 meg of RAM that Fedora 
16 requires), Debian 6.0.4, and CentOS 6.2.  32-bit and 64-bit versions 
of all (except for 10.04 LTS, I only have as 32-bit).

There was some concern expressed at the GUM/Installfest on Saturday, 
about power availability in HackPittsburgh's shop.  Doug assures me that 
there are two main workbenches with a total of at least 30 outlets 
between them, so we should be good on power.

I think we can do this with only a few volunteers.  And (unlike this 
past Saturday - when, for better or worse, it was not a problem...) I 
will make sure to bring blank WPLUG membership forms and maybe some 
other kinds of promotional stuff if we can come up with something (for 
people who are interested, but don't want to commit to joining WPLUG on 
the spot).

Does this seem like a reasonable plan?

--Pat.